An initial surprise in Robert Olen Butler's historical novel “The Hot Country” comes from the fact that it is a thriller with a reporter as the protagonist.

It's a risk for a writer, given the long stretches of tedium that usually characterizes the journalistic life. Butler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction winner who teaches at Florida State University, makes it work with the help of an exotic setting.

Christopher Marlowe Cobb, a Chicago newspaper reporter, is on assignment in the Mexican port city of Veracruz in 1914. The Mexican revolution is under way. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson has sent troops to occupy Veracruz. A German ship loaded with munitions is docked in Veracruz' bay. World War I is only months away.

Cobb, as cynical as journalists come, files his stories by telegraph. The booze is flowing. The casual sex is spontaneous. But, facing competition from other foreign correspondents in Veracruz, Cobb is looking for a good story.

His first-person narrative, in an original voice readers must become accustomed to, springs to life when a high-level German government figure with a scar on his face surreptitiously comes to shore from the ship in the dead of night.

Meanwhile, Cobb has become attracted to a hotel laundress, Luisa, who epitomizes the kind of reckless, violent type of female soldier that became famous during the Mexican revolution. People start getting shot by a sniper.

Cobb hires a crafty, sneaky boy to do some spying on the German consulate and the German scarface. Events develop from there. Along the way, the settings move to the Coahuila desert, Chicago and New Orleans, where Cobb's mother sings in brothels. San Antonio makes a cameo appearance. The Alamo itself may not be safe from German intentions.

The reader will meet Pancho Villa along the way in scenes where anything can happen from moment to moment.

The plot starts off well, and the tension is well-sustained. The scenic descriptions and characters are appealing. The action has plenty of surprises. Overall, readers will find much to enjoy. It's just that the final chapters take some hard-to-accept turns. Is Cobb really that close to being a 1914 Superman?